Learning to Breathe
by Stacey Verda
Summary: Lilly Kane is six feet under, your mother tucked you in one night then disappeared, and you’re on life support.


**So when I first started writing this, it centered primarily around Veronica's feelings toward Lilly and Lianne. And then Logan had to sneak in and steal the show. He's always doing that. Anyway, this pretty much stays true to Season 1 until the end. Logan doesn't get involved in that whole mess on the bridge. Also, I should probably mention that when I write Veronica, she always comes out way more unbalanced than she ever actually does on the show. And finally, I stole a little part from one of my first ficlets, "Breathing, Beating, Breaking". Alrighty, I'll shut up now. Enjoy, please.**

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Lilly Kane is six feet under, your mother tucked you in one night then disappeared, and you're on life support.

---

Currently you're just concentrating on making sure your heart still beats. You sit in class with your left hand gripping your right wrist, two fingers pressed hard against your pulse point. You figure that next week, you'll focus on breathing. Or work on holding yourself together, because you're constantly in danger of falling apart, actually, literally falling apart. You're often surprised when you wake in the morning and your limbs are still loyally attached. And when the wind blows a little too hard, when Logan's meaningless words crash against the outer layer you're working on erecting, when someone elbows you in the crowded halls at school, you wait to shatter, but it never happens.

Then there are days when you're not falling apart, you're fading, losing your outline and melting into the wallpaper. And when you feel particularly water-colored, when you aren't too busy hating your mother to miss her, you spray a few drops of the perfume she left behind on the insides of your wrists so you can close your eyes and smell her throughout the day. Or you wear the sunglasses Lianne forgot, the ones that don't really fit and slide from the bridge of your nose, hang from your ears, whenever you bend over. You feel kind of like a little kid playing dress-up, stumbling around in her mother's high heel shoes and costume jewelry, lipstick smeared across her lips and chin, blush smudged heavily along her cheekbones. If your dad notices, he doesn't say anything, and you love him a little more for it.

---

You didn't even bother reading the letter Lianne left with that stupid fucking music box. It was just words, and words don't mean anything, especially since she was probably drunk when she penned them, left, and hasn't been heard from since. They're just ink and paper promises, and those don't count for much. Like the _DK + VM_ you used to trap in a heart in the margins of your notebook, then scribble out before anyone, particularly Lilly, could see.

---

One afternoon you were watching TV with Lilly, one of those ridiculously cheesy yet oddly engrossing talk shows, and the subject was fatal brain tumors. These people all had the same complaints: relentless headaches, seeing flashes of light at the edges of their vision, forgetfulness, constantly smelling something burning.

And sometimes, you'll be in the middle of a conversation (although you haven't been doing much talking lately) or reading a book or something and suddenly your mind goes blank. You'll stare at whoever you're talking to and have no idea what to say. You'll read sentences over and over without ever discovering the meaning. Or you forget to do important things, the stuff that you normally wouldn't think twice about, like wearing socks.

And maybe you're just being paranoid, but sometimes you see lightening that doesn't exist. You probably imagine the burning. But it's not long before you've convinced yourself that you have some kind of malignant brain tumor. It's not long before you're positive that you have a million other afflictions, too.

Because you're beginning to realize the number of things that should scare you. Some one could smash an ashtray against your head, no warning, and it would be the end of it all.

It happened to someone else you know. Who's to say it can't happen to you?

---

The force field doesn't magically build itself overnight. It's gradual, a combination of blurred edges slowly sharpening and going whole days without analyzing your breathing pattern.

Life goes on. It's as simple as that. When your mother skips town and you're separated from your best friend by suffocating dirt and a staggering headstone, the world doesn't stop. You kind of think it probably should, fervently wish it would, maybe just for a few seconds, just so you don't have to think about anything for a while. So you can stop that shaking your fingers do when you don't concentrate on staying still.

But the world keeps going, so you yield to oncoming vehicles, hand in your English assignment, choke down some rubbery chicken nuggets, clean your room, feed Backup, smile when your dad makes a joke. You do all these things without even realizing it.

You start to think of yourself as "you", because even though they really are nothing, you find you have to remind yourself every time Logan Echolls opens his mouth: _Words don't matter_. Maybe they don't matter, but they still sometimes sting. So when syllables bounce around in your brain after Logan spits something at you, you say them, and enjoy the falter of his smirk, the surprise that flickers briefly across his eyes, and resolve to do it more often. Pledge to make him sting, too.

You put as much distance as you can between the pastels of your past and the shadows you live in now, the outside and your insides. Bury everything under layers of artfully crafted comebacks, short sharp hair, the click of a camera. Squeeze your fists so tightly you leave little bloody half-moons across your palms.

And you only let yourself cry late at night, when your dad can't hear. When you can go in the bathroom, turn on the shower, slump in the corner of the tub with your clothes still on and pretend the steaming streams of water shooting from the shower head are the only reasons moisture soaks the skin of your cheeks.

---

One day you're in Rite Aid and you see this bottle of dark plum nail polish that reminds you of the slippers Lilly always scuffled around in whenever she slept over. And since you're tired of perfect pinks and whispering whites you buy it. You apply it in the bathroom, first on your toe nails, then fingers, watching as the polish drips into your cuticles and stains the gnawed flesh, admiring the blunt punctuation shouting at your finger tips. While they dry you practice glaring at your reflection in the mirror, perfect speaking with just the right amount of venom and flippancy.

You buy a leather jacket from the Salvation Army, burry Lianne's perfume in the bottom of your closet. You stop mourning the innocence you lost along with Lilly, the purity ripped from you so unceremoniously that blurry night in a dark, unfamiliar room. You start solving other people's mysteries, since the questions burning through your head remain unanswered. You get used to the dull ache, the emptiness, that resides somewhere deep in your chest. You evolve, morph, turn into someone else without Lilly and Lianne anchoring the old you together.

You try to pinpoint the exact moment everything—_you_—changed, and the obvious choice would be the day your best friend's heart stopped. But now you're realizing: It isn't a sudden, one-time event. It's a process, an accumulation of incidents, overheard conversations, tiny revelations. It's not a sudden change but a continuing shift. You've been walking away from Veronica Mars, soft sweet sixteen-year-old, so slowly that you don't even notice how far you've gotten until it's too late to turn back.

And standing in an unfamiliar place, looking back at where you can't ever go again, you finally understand: Officially, on the surface, it all crumbled when Lilly died. But the truth is, things started changing long before that. The seams began picking apart the day you found your mother, asleep and wrapped around the toilet, an almost-empty bottle of cheap vodka hugged between her slack fingers. When Logan would refuse to take his shirt off for days in a row, even when he went swimming, and in the pit of your stomach you maybe knew why. When Duncan broke up with you, stopped talking to you, refused to look at you without ever giving a reason.

Your life was always slowly unraveling; Lilly's death was just the catalyst finally ripping it all to pieces.

So now you're waiting. Waiting for things to go back to how they were before after. Waiting for the glue that will paste your pieces whole again. Waiting for a manual, instructions, a map back to normal. You can't find it on your own. And that distant portion of your brain, the part reserved solely for the thoughts you'd rather not think, is beginning to hint that maybe there is no way back. Maybe there is no normal. Only naivety.

But that's an idea you can't bare to accept or even acknowledge. So you decide to stop waiting for normal to come to you, resolve to chase it down yourself. You'll find out who ripped your life apart and make them pay, get your mom where she belongs, put everything back to before.

You haven't found that map, but you know the first step is solving Lilly Kane's murder. And hopefully once that happens, everything else will fall into place.

---

As the days, weeks, months tally up, you slowly thaw. But it's always there, sometimes hidden just below the surface, other times screaming at you in all capital letters, YOUR BEST FRIEND NO LONGER EXISTS.

And then there are mornings when everything's okay for five seconds until you remember, your whole body remembers at the same time, and it's happening all over again.

You see Lilly, missing half her skull and in her pep squad uniform, that awful punch line, and it's like you're dying too. Whole minutes pass without a breath. Your heart pounds slowly, excruciatingly, and you press your hand against your chest and wait until it jumps again, always positive that it won't.

And then you turn off your alarm clock, take a shower, eat some soggy waffles, drive to school. Make it through three classes without thinking about her, or the other her. Some days, more often now, you even laugh.

Until you're stalking to math, glaring at anyone who dares make eye contact, and a certain slant of light grabs you by the wrist and yanks you back. A flip of almost-blond hair catches you off guard, stopping you dead in your tracks, stilling your heart, and you have to encourage yourself to keep breathing.

You're left alone as the bell clears the hallway, staring at her fucking locker, your feet sweating uncomfortably in a pair of boots, realizing that this is what it feels like to go crazy: seeing a ghost, forgetting to wear socks, trying to melt into dirty linoleum, uncomfortably aware of each beat of your heart. And you can't understand how it can be possible to hurt this much and keep going. You're slowly decaying inside, you're sure of it. You imagine your heart and liver like that rat you dissected in biology a few weeks ago, gray and dry and cracking. You're getting better at pretending and pushing it away, but the truth is it's too hard not to remember what you know you can never forget.

"What's so great about living?"

Sometimes you have to admit, you haven't quite figured that one out either. It seems that at some point, life became less about living and more about trying to stay alive.

---

You try to hate her, you really do. But she wasn't always like that. It started slow, with a few glasses of wine for desert, progressed with two aspirins and a beer for breakfast, reached its peak when you'd come home from school and she'd be asleep on the couch, dressed in pajamas and cuddling her latest preference of bottled escapism like a teddy bear. And when you took out the trash there'd be too many glass bottles clinking together as you swung the bag into the garbage.

But she wasn't always like that.

And that's the hardest part about hating her. You hate what she did—and the list is definitely long—but you can't help but remember the taste of her lasagna, those hideous toe socks she always wore around the house, her obsession with Fred Astaire movies, the way she'd smell your hair every time she walked past you at the kitchen table when you were trying to do your homework.

The nights you both spent giggling under your comforter, pretending you were camping and your dad's snores were a bear (and ignoring the sharp secret hinting in her whisper). The sound of her feet padding down the hallway at midnight, on her way to the kitchen to make a tomato sandwich (washed down with a sip of gin). The way she'd doodle the backsides of elephants on napkins while waiting for dinner at a restaurant (a glass of wine inches from her hand).

It may be too hard to hate her because she wasn't always a drunk, but finding out that she may have always been an adulteress makes those things a lot easier to ignore.

---

You hear it on the radio: Lynn Echolls just stepped off the Coronado Bridge into the Pacific, and a part of you is jealous. That night, when you're lying in bed, memorizing the ceiling, covers pulled tight to your chin, you imagine doing it. Starting at the ocean bleeding into the sky bleeding into the ocean. Blue blue blue. Feeling the concrete under your feet then feeling nothing at all, nothing but the wind tugging your hair and that drop in your stomach you can feel just lying in bed, memorizing the ceiling, covers pulled tight to your chin.

You think that you wouldn't mind disappearing in all that blue.

But you know it's not that easy. Or graceful. That a swan dive from that height would crush you on impact. Blood, shredded skin, shattered bones. And then you feel guilty for wanting it and nauseous from imaging so much red in all that blue.

You have to laugh at yourself, even though there's nothing funny at all, because you've kind of become obsessed with death. It happened sometime after you saw Lilly, crumpled, staring, drowning in her own blood and almost-blond hair, staining the pavement. You can't get it out of your head.

And now Logan's stuck there, too. Fucking _Logan_, with his meaningless words that still sometimes sting, whose solitary mission in life seems to be breaking you. Whose mother is blood, shredded skin, shattered bones in the blue blue red of the Coronado Bridge's horizon. Who was just at your door, wrapped in a coat and his own arms, grasping an engraved flask and a barely-existent glimmer of hope.

You tried with him, too.

Hating people is a whole lot harder than it should be.

---

Time no longer runs smooth and untouched; whole days slip past unnoticed while each second painfully ticks through your bones. And that's how you explain standing outside an FBI agent's room at a cheap motel, kissing the boy you tried to hate.

While his lips move with yours you wonder what part you skipped over, what you missed, because the cause in your head doesn't quite transition into this effect.

_I'm kissing Logan Echolls._

And you don't exactly hate it.

You stumble into your car, yank the seatbelt across your chest, try to remember where you're going. But Lilly left Logan too and his mother is… gone and for some reason he came when he thought you needed help. It's all making you wonder if maybe he knows what it feels like when your heart quiets for minutes at a time. If he ever forgets to wear socks. If Lily gives him fashion advice. If he hopes the world will stop for a little while. If he daydreams in blue blue blue.

You again see the way he looked at you, like he didn't know what he was doing, either, and wonder if he couldn't hate you the way you simply can't hate him. You wonder why your dull ache subsided slightly with his lips pressed to yours, how he could fit so perfectly against you when you feel so absolutely jagged.

_And now I know I'm crazy._

_--- _

You don't hate him. But you hate the stupid way his grin tugs on your heartstrings, that he can make your heart catapult up your throat just by finding your eyes in the crowded hallway, the feel of his fingers skimming the small of your back.

You hate that you can't help but love the taste of his laugh against your lips, being sandwiched between Logan and the cold tiles of a bathroom wall, when he rests his forehead against yours.

_I love secrets._

You don't hate him; you can't even pretend to anymore. But you can hate yourself, because you erected that outer layer to keep him out, and now he's slowly pushing his way through. Because you kind of want to tell him things you haven't told anyone. Ever. Because you're giving him a second chance and you don't hand those out to anyone. Ever.

_Logan Echolls is my secret boyfriend._

You hate yourself because you don't hate it.

---

Forget smashed headlights, his Veronica Mars Is a Slut! campaign, the way he treats everyone who doesn't live in his zip code, organized bum fights. This is the worst thing he's ever done.

He's sitting across from you, hands tangled with yours, amber eyes promising something you don't want to even think about.

"All I care about is you."

This is the worst thing he's ever done. Because for some reason, you believe him. His hands are becoming your new anchor, he's peeling you like a fucking onion and you're crying. Veronica Mars is crying in front of Logan Echolls.

This is the worst thing he's ever done _because I'm just glad you're here_. And you honestly can't think of anyone else you'd rather be with right now.

---

When you come home and Lianne—_Mom_—is sitting there on the couch next to your dad like she never left, you don't really know what to think. You smile, hug her, try to do the math in your head because rehab sure didn't seem to take very long.

But she's home, you can almost feel Lilly's answers brushing the tips of your fingers and _Logan Echolls is my secret boyfriend_. The ground seems more solid and recently you've had a change of heart when it comes to second chances.

_That's me: Veronica Mars, marshmallow._

_--- _

You're memorizing the ceiling again. And you really hate yourself now.

"All I want to do is protect you."

_Words don't mean anything._

"I want you to trust me."

_Words don't mean anything, words don't mean anything._

"I do."

_I really am crazy. And stupid._

He told everyone you were his girlfriend, picked you over his friends. Helped you when you thought you needed it, smiled for you, let you taste his laugh. You held him when he fell apart. You told him your secrets and fucking_ cried_ in front of him.

You said that you trusted him, because, _Hell if I know why_, you did. Until you found those cameras.

Maybe now, finally, you'll be able to hate him.

It rains all night. The window's closed, but you can feel it on your face.

---

_Logan wasn't in Tijuana._

Even though you're trying to hate him again, Beaver's confession cuts right through you. You really shouldn't be so surprised anymore. People lie. People betray you. People leave. You know the rules, life introduced itself a long time ago, but you still find yourself hiding in a bathroom stall for the first time in a long time, tracking your pulse with two fingers and trying to catch your breath.

And then you splash some cold water on your cheeks, tell your dad what you found out. Act like nothing's wrong when you talk to Logan, even though your head is cracking in half and part of you wants to grab him by the shoulders, shake the truth out of him, make him tell you that he didn't do it, that he'd never hurt Lilly. Instead, you let him kiss you on the forehead, let your dad call Lamb.

"_I want you to trust me."_

"_I do."_

And then later, you're both on the beach and he's recommending that you stick your head in an oven, telling you about some letter. You ignore the film of tears in his eyes, the despondence settling along the slump of his shoulders, the way his fingers shake when he doesn't concentrate on staying still. It smells like something's burning and that ache isn't so dull anymore, but you ignore it.

You've lost your peripheral vision. Your concentration is solely focused on Lilly Kane now and you're going to put your life back together.

So you push Logan (_All I care about is you All I want to do is protect you I want you to trust me_) into the corner of your mind and try to find that letter. But it has nothing to do with wanting Logan to be innocent.

_Yeah, okay._

All you want is the truth, and nothing's getting in your way now.

---

When your eyes flicker open, it's black and stale and you can't remember where you are. And then the walkie-talkie next to your head crackles to life and you remember and this time you know, you absolutely _know_, that your heart is going to quit on you. You pound against your coffin, scream, try not to listen to Aaron waxing insane about Joan of Arc. Gasoline fumes fill your lungs and now you know what fear tastes like, metallic and too much carbon dioxide. The way he says your name makes your entire body shake and when he says Lilly's, you squeeze your hands so tightly you break apart tiny half-moon scabs.

Everything's muffled in the freezer but then you hear your dad and you can't help but love him so much tears spike your eyelashes and trace your cheekbones. Of course he saves you, he's your hero that stayed, and you cry all the way to the hospital because your heart is still beating and finally finally _finally_ Aaron Echolls will get what he deserves.

---

"I was hoping it would be you."

Your voice is hoarse from screaming and smoke, your dad is in the hospital and Lianne is gone again, but you're allowed to trust Logan Echolls. There's a slow tingle tickling through your body, like when you've been sitting on your foot for too long. Blood rushes back into your veins, waking up your heart, pounding at your fingertips, and you can hear it. The ache is fading, your questions are answered, your not-so-secret maybe-boyfriend is innocent and holding you like he never plans on letting go.

You don't apologize. You accused him of killing someone you loved to death and a few meaningless words won't—can't—make that go away. But he pretended to hate you for a year and his dad set you on fire and nearly killed yours, so you're sort of even. His tears in your hair and his arms pressing you against him seem a little like forgiveness, anyway.

"I'm just glad you're here."

His hands grip your hips protectively as he whispers against your forehead, "I'm just glad you're _alive_." Words don't mean much, but you like the way that sounds, and couldn't agree more.

---

You float in the pool, opening one eye occasionally to watch him watch you.

He traces his fingers up your arm and you wish you could find words to encompass this thing bubbling inside you, but nothing seems to come close. It's not love, but it's something like it, and you don't know how to make him understand with words that don't really explain or mean anything. So you just smile and focus on his fingerprints against your skin, concentrate on the crisp water outlining your body.

Nothing's fixed yet; you haven't really found normal, but the edges are just a little less jagged. Things are slowly falling back into place and the empty spaces in between don't feel so insurmountable. Breathing is back to being an unconscious effort and you—the you buried under layers of artfully crafted comebacks, short sharp hair, the click of a camera—are content just bobbing next to your boyfriend, letting him crack through your shell so you can peek between those empty spaces and taste fresh air again. Watching a promising blue sky and feeling the sun's warmth kissing your bare shoulders, the world almost seems like it's on pause, so you lean back and listen to your life catch up.


End file.
